


No traveller returns

by Aegir



Series: Those who fight Monsters [3]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: Implied/Referenced Brainwashing, Implied/Referenced Torture, SHIELD backstory, Suicide Attempt, Winter Soldier Backstory
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-12-08
Updated: 2014-12-08
Packaged: 2018-02-28 14:02:06
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,022
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2735249
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Aegir/pseuds/Aegir
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>The Winter Soldier goes to Camp Lehigh in search of answers</p>
            </blockquote>





	No traveller returns

**Author's Note:**

> Warning for all the things you'd expect to need warning for in a story which recalls the creation of the Winter Soldier, and also a brief reference to attempted self-starvation

There was a fence around that was no challenge, and some clearly bored guards easily avoided. Inside it was like any destruction site, a lot of heavy lifting equipment and a thick layer of dust. A skip held some articles that were more than rubble but less than salvage, he glanced down into it and saw a picture on the top, a hard-faced older man in uniform. He remembered the man, in fragments, but did not pause. It was a small site, so he found the shaft quickly enough, found there was still an elevator cable snaking down.

The secret below a secret had been built to last. The main walls were solid still, and much of the rubble had been cleared. No need for a torch, his night vision was sharp enough without. As he moved further in shards of tape crunched under his boots. There wasn’t much else, only some old utilitarian furniture nobody had bothered to cart away.

Nothing to get hold of. White walls, blurring into white walls of other bases recalled in broken snatches. He couldn’t even get the positions of the doors to match. They could have changed, he could tell some of the internal walls were only flimsy partitions. But he had to face that a more likely answer was that some of the things he thought he knew were wrong.

Later. He didn’t have to face it now. He needed to be out of here by morning. HYDRA had taught him to lock things away things away, so he locked away the likelihood he had just found a new set of ways his mind was scrambled, and concentrated on whether there was anything this cleaned out ruin could tell him. There were only scraps remaining, but he was good at interpreting scraps. They’d been all he had for a long time, and despite knowing they’d be torn out whenever the pieces began to fit he’d kept collecting, reading, a malfunctioning weapon trying to think like a human.   HYDRA had kept upgrading the wiping process, but though they erased the scraps he grasped, they never wiped the skills he learned.   Including those they’d never meant to teach.

He’d got a lot of scraps now. Enough to understand what they did to him. Enough to start piercing together all he’d done and been. If he had to throw some away now, he’d still keep going, because he didn’t deserve to just lie down and give up.

He pulled open a couple of filing cabinets, but they’d been cleared out. Considered collecting the tape, but he’d probably need a technology museum to play it. There was nothing in this room, so he pushed open a metal door which gave a painfully protesting shriek, and went into the room beyond.

A dust covered desk, a couple of old swivel chairs, some empty crates. And set into the concrete floor, a heavy metal ring.

He stepped carefully backward, until the wall could support his weight. His control was very good most of the time, another unintentional lesson from HYDRA. He had stared into his past in a crowded room without flinching. But here, alone, in this place, he was unsure of his body.

His body was his strength: stronger faster, more durable than human flesh had a right to be. His shredded, tortured mind had been his weakness. Here was where they had made his body a weapon used against him, a prison that left no escape into death.

Here. Half-naked on concrete. Shackled to the ring in the floor. Arms chained behind him, the left one deactivated after he’d killed two scientists with it, a dead hunk of metal nailed to his side. He had tried to starve himself, and that had played right into their hands, keeping him weak.

The other room had been different then. That was where the chair had been. The first chair. Where they had first driven ice hot needles into his brain, again and again. Where they had stripped him, flayed him, taken everything.

He could remember times they dragged him back to the cell wrecked with agony and times they left him chained in the chair. He remembered the screen, the camera footage they had shown him.

He remembered the little smug-faced man, he knew that man’s name, didn’t think he ever forgot that, he remembered the man showing papers that said Captain America was dead.

But he was already losing himself by then. Among the rending grief and the death of the last stubborn hope that Steve would come for him again, among that had been the conviction that Captain America wasn’t real.   Captain America was just an act, Steve was in Brooklyn weighing 100 pounds at most, everything else was all in his head. He’d never been pulled off a table by a Steve Rogers transformed through a bizarre experiment, the torture had just gone on and on until his mind spiraled into fantasy.

There were many faces came and went on the screen, but there were always three that returned. Four in all, but the fourth, the smug-faced man was the one he saw in his cage, not just on the cameras. The others were two men; one older, one younger; and one woman. He’d had names for them once, but that was likely in his head as well. He told himself that, as he saw them nod in agreement as Zola talked, bend over the papers Zola showed them in approval.  

He had screamed at first. Screamed in sudden hope, screamed his throat raw, picturing the moment they would hear and come and drag the remains of him out so the pain would stop. Instead he had time after time seen them working with Zola. Over and over, until he had convinced himself he had never known them, never seen them outside of the screen. The increasingly fractured memories were invention, he had never seen the woman in a red dress, or stood in a tent and reported to the older man. Because the people he thought he remembered would not have let this be done to him. It was better to think he had never known them at all than that he had not known his agony would mean nothing to them.

_“They have discarded Sergeant Barnes. Did you think they placed any value on him? How foolish. Common soldiers are nothing, easily replaced. They require something stronger, harder. A perfect weapon.”_

At some point he had slid down the wall so that he was crouched, his flesh arm wrapped tightly around his body.

He knew now. He had walked through the exhibit telling the story of Captain America, seen their faces again there in pictures, an interview with the woman. That past was real. Bits of it had filtered back. Enough that he knew he had never trusted Stark, but had known he had no rational reason for not trusting him, it was only because the table had left him afraid of all scientists. Phillips had seemed straight enough for a colonel. Agent Carter, well, Steve thought highly of her, and Steve was prickly and defensive usually, so that had been good enough for him.

He had combed the released files on the internet as well. A lot had been taken down before he got to it, but there was enough still circulating for him to piece together something of SHIELD’s beginnings. They hadn’t known he was down here. But they had known Zola had tortured him before, and it had made no difference to them.

He remembered now that he’d come to dread seeing Steve with the others on the screen, Steve shaking Zola’s hand or smiling at him. He remembered before the last of his mind was ripped away he’d come to think Steve had never been real, his family were never real, nothing but the pain and the man who inflicted it were ever real. He’d thought even he himself was not real, he was not a person, he was manufactured somehow, a Thing in flesh.

He might not have been wrong on that. The pasts he’d remembered had happened. But he was a Thing all the same.

Chained on the floor he’d carved out the thought that perhaps when they took the last piece of his mind, then he would be dead, even if his body kept on going. He’d known by then. Known they were carving him away, piece by piece, and there was nothing, nothing at all, that he could do. Known they wouldn’t let his body die. Maybe, just maybe, his soul wouldn’t be tied to it. Maybe all that would be left was the weapon they wanted.

Familiarity shifted. There were memories, broken and jumbled, more of them falling into his damaged mind all the time. The ones from Brooklyn seldom felt like his. The ones from the war might feel they belonged to him one day, and like it was another man the next. But the man who screamed in this bunker, it always seemed like that man had been him. But maybe that man’s soul had gone. Maybe he was just HYDRA’s weapon practicing how to think. It wasn’t a new idea. It didn’t get any easier, even though if he had no soul he couldn’t be damned.

It was hard, but he forced himself up. His knees were reluctant to carry him, and there was a foul taste in his mouth. He needed to finish this.   Once it was done he’d tear apart for a few hours, and then make a new patchwork with the new pieces he’d found.

He wondered what had become of the three from the films. The older man, the one he’d once saluted and called Sir, must be dead by now. The other two also, most probably. He adds their names to his list of things to confirm, all the same. The internet should tell him.

There was something about Stark, nagging him. Sometimes memories came back like that, like something ordinary he’d just misplaced. Sometimes they hit like a punch, sometimes they were just there. This didn’t have the feel of a first-hand memory, something he’d overheard more likely, though he couldn’t be sure. If HYDRA killed Stark he wouldn’t mourn.

Back out into the larger room, now he knew for certain he was made here, there must be more he could find. Unsteady and nauseous he made himself stand where the chair had been, and mark the changes in the room. There, to his right, a grill that might be part of a ventilation system. But there had been no grill there before, there had been something else.

The metal arm made short work of the grill and the door concealed behind it. There were no files inside, just an old metal tray filled with bits of what he thought at first glance were junk. A rusted pocket knife. A rotted lump that might once have been a wallet. A button compass, surprisingly intact. A few loose coins.

Dog tags.

He knew what would be carved on those tags without needing to read them. These bits of detritus, they had plunged with him into the void. They had been kept, as trophies perhaps, or perhaps just logged and transported bureaucratically. Then left and forgotten. They had belonged to the man destroyed here. They had been his.

_James Buchanan Barnes._

He didn’t have possessions. He used objects, weapons, clothing, tools. Used and discarded. He had to hoard his resources now, but he did not think of them as belonging to him. There was no point, when he knew there was nothing that could not be stripped from him, even the thoughts in his head. Yet he gathered up the relics and stowed them safely away in a pocket, letting the chain on the tags run through the fingers of his flesh hand, rubbing the marks on the metal that had once held an identity.  

_James Buchanan Barnes._

He turned his back on the room and returned to the shaft. He needed to be out of there by morning.


End file.
